• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

canada-landscape-cityscape

Canadian Modernism at the Present Time

Here, Brian Trehearne expands on his inspirations, and the wider context behind his article in Modernist Cultures (November 2018). My article in Modernist Cultures volume 13.4, ‘Canadian Modernism at the Present Time’, had a number of prompts, only one of which…

Gertrude Stein’s Transmasculinity

By Chris Coffman The Parisian salon hosted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas was unique among queer modernist spaces. Unlike Natalie Barney’s salon emphasizing women, femininity, and Sapphic identity or the cosmopolitan Paris of queer outcasts surveyed in ‘John’…

The Rosetta Stone

By Jesse Schotter For the hordes of selfie-snapping tourists at the British Museum, one objects attracts more attention than any other: the Rosetta Stone.  Such fascination with the Stone and its hieroglyphs dates back centuries.  From the classical era through the…

Proletarian Modernism

By Nick Hubble Modernism raises questions. On one level, it expresses the personal questions about subjectivity that writers such as Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf sought to answer in a world turned upside down by the discovery of…

blast manifesto image

Top 10 Modernist Manifestos from Britain and Ireland

During the early 20th century avant-garde countries like France, Italy, Russia, and Germany provided fertile ground for manifesto writing: Dada, Surrealism, and myriad Futurisms all were born out of this rich soil – or, more fittingly, the ‘good factory muck’…

Modernism in Public

By Rod Rosenquist and Alice Wood As we near the end of 2016, ‘the people’ keep finding ways to make political headlines. In Britain, a failed coup in a major political party has cleared the way for ‘the people’ to…